Page 30 of Beau and the Beast

The reporter was right where Wolfram expected him to be, seated at the table in the center of the room.

He’s merely a child, Wolfram realized. Barely looked old enough to drive.

The reporter froze, his posture going straight and eyes wide.

Beau Blake was singularly beautiful—not at all what Wolfram had expected. This thing with enormous blue eyes and a comely cherub’s pout—thiswas Violet’s reporter?

They locked eyes as Wolfram approached the table with measured steps. He prepared for the man to bolt from the room, to scream or close his eyes, or scramble for cover as Wolfram's staff all had the first time they'd seen him.

But the man didn't move. He didn't react. He fixed Wolfram with a steady gaze—not unfriendly.

And so slowly, cautiously, Wolfram continued his path to the table.

* * *

For a moment, Beau thought something had gone wrong in his brain.

The coffee from this morning,he thought,must have been drugged.

Or perhaps the stress of the past week had been too much—breaking up with his boyfriend, the blackmail with his brother, being kidnapped, quitting his job for $50 million—it had all added up inappropriately in his mind until something snapped and he was having some sort of major hallucination, a psychotic break.

He was looking at an animal—a monster, he thought. This was no costume, no trick of the eye.

The thing before him stood upright like a man, its legs working gracefully as it walked slowly forward. It looked like a still from a science fiction movie reel, one where an experiment went wrong and left the villain as something halfway between animal and man.

It was towering, larger than life, maybe seven feet tall or maybe less—its height complicated by the fact that two twisting horns emerged from its head just above the temples, black and fat, curling back cruelly like the horns of a giant longhorn ram. The face beneath the horns, though, was both feline and human, a dark snubbed nose with round golden eyes framed by a dark mane.

A tufted lion’s tail cut the air behind the thing as it approached.

This was what Noah had captured online. This was the beast in the penthouse, and it was no exotic pet. It was a monster beyond anything Beau had ever dared imagine.

But even as the thought flashed through his brain, he knew it wasn't true.

This wasa manin front of him. He'd just spoken to Beau, after all.

It was evendressedlike a man, a small gold watch absurdly circling one big wrist, its hips covered in simple short breeches, and a vest draped across its shoulders.

Beau should've been horrified—or maybe convinced that he was dreaming.

But suddenly things made sense. He was looking at Mr. Wolfram.

The secrecy, the man's staff. The penthouse and the security measures. The reason why they wanted Beau to write his biography.

Maybe he shouldn't have been awed. Maybe he shouldn't have trusted what he was seeing at all.

But somewhere, in the back of his mind, Beau had alwaysknownthat there were things on the earth that were marvelous and unthinkable. Therehadto be. In his 27 years of life, he knew that he hadn't seen all there was to see.

Beau knew in that moment that he was in the room with someone exceptional, someone few other humans would ever get to see. Maybe Mr. Wolfram was the only one of his kind, Beau thought.

Some deep, ancient part of his brain was screaming that Beau was in mortal danger. But his heart, his imagination, everything that made Beau different from the next person, told him that he should behonored.

A new reality unfurled in his chest, full of unknowns, of excitement, of adventure. He’d been waiting his whole life for a moment like this and finally, illogically, in the penthouse of 330 West in the nicest neighborhood of New Whitby, Beau the orphan, Beau the reporter, Beau the man who refused to compromise for anything was finally about to do something extraordinary.

* * *

Wolfram waitedfor the reporter to scurry away.

He waited for the man to ask him if he was dreaming.

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